by Dunne, Lexie
I saw the moment he spotted me, his eyes narrowing behind the smudged lenses of his glasses. And just like that, I was back in the bottom of a silo that had been turned into a labyrinth, trying desperately to scream and warn Blaze about the razor blades. His face went from blandly pleasant to a mask of fury and rage. He let out a yell and charged through the crowd, right at me. I couldn’t do anything but watch him loom larger and larger, hands stretched out to choke me.
Rita stepped into Shock Value’s path and calmly clotheslined him. She barely even seemed to move, but in the next second, she was holding him up by the throat. While hovering three feet off the ground. She looked down into Shock Value’s rapidly purpling face without a single expression of violence or anger in her eyes, and in that moment, I understood what made Rita Detmer so dangerous.
“And just what, pray tell, do you think you’re doing?” she asked, her tone almost bored.
Shock Value garbled something and tried to break free of her grip, Velcro shoes kicking uselessly at the air.
Rita merely tightened her grip. “No, I think you misunderstand,” she said, her tone never changing. “It doesn’t matter what happened between you and Miss Godwin, or that she is the reason you’re in here. She’s mine now. Get me?”
Shock Value made a high-pitched wheeze.
“Thought so,” Rita said, and threw him against the wall so hard, I heard the metal clang. He lay in a motionless heap.
Rita, on the other hand, drifted back to the ground. Tucking her breakfast under her arm, she pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket. She wiped her hand clean, meticulously. “Any questions?” she asked the gathered crowd.
Unsurprisingly, nobody had any. People hurried past Shock Value’s prone body, keeping their heads down so they wouldn’t have to meet Rita’s eye or look at me. Rita sniffed and turned to me.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, dual feelings of dread and relief rising through me.
She shrugged. “You cry enough as it is.”
“Thanks, I guess,” I said, my voice frosty.
She started walking toward the offices again, completely blasé about the fact that she had maybe just killed a man. “At least you bothered to say thank you. My last roommate wasn’t so circumspect.”
I really, really didn’t want to know what happened to her last roommate.
“Somebody’ll be along to show you to your cubicle. Toodle-oo,” Rita said, as we walked past a receptionist. I checked to make sure it wasn’t the same receptionist from my old job at Mirror Reality. But even though I might think Portia McPeak was the worst, the justice system didn’t seem to believe she belonged in prison. The receptionist was a young man with spiky blue hair that matched the spikes protruding from his wrists and elbows.
“Wait,” I said before Rita could walk off. “What do we even do here?”
“Girlie, we’re supervillains. What else would we do?” She pointed up.
The sign hung from the ceiling. internal revenue service, headquarters.
“Oh, that is not good,” I said, and Rita cackled as she walked off.
A second later, a new figure rounded the corner, and I wanted to sigh. I’d already faced my worst-nightmare villain that morning, so of course it made sense that they would send my most frequent villain to apparently turn me into an IRS agent. “You’re not here to attack me, are you? Rita doesn’t take kindly to that sort of thing, and she’s scarier than you, no offense.”
Razor X, however, gave me a hurt look through her face shield. It was weird seeing her without her little cape though apparently the bulbous purple helmet was allowed in the prison. Maybe it helped her breathe.
“How could you?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“I was supposed to be your archnemesis, but you went and got yourself another one. I’m so offended. Did all of our time together mean nothing to you?”
She’d dosed me with so many painful concoctions of her own making so many times, I’d lost count. I didn’t want to give her any sort of loyalty. I wanted to give her a punch in the face. “What are you talking about? You’re a villain!”
“Oh, come on. That hardly means anything if you don’t kill people. You were going to develop powers sooner or later, so I was perfectly positioned to be your personal archnemesis. I had it all worked out, but apparently you went and found Chelsea. Yeah, Lady Danger and Venus-von-Shut-Your-Trapp told me all about it. Ugh. She doesn’t even have a real villain name.”
“What is even happening?” I asked the ceiling.
“You’re my cubicle mate, so we’ll always have that, I guess.” Razor X flopped petulantly into a desk chair. “We could’ve been great, Girl.”
“Gail.” I dropped into the other chair. “You want to be my nemesis, get my damn name right.”
“Fine. You can call me Raze.”
“I didn’t pick my archnemesis. She killed a good friend of mine,” I said, setting my breakfast on the desk and lining the box up neatly against the edge. Focusing on the precise movements helped. Otherwise, I really would hit something. Chelsea was out there, free, and Angélica was dead. I breathed deep and looked over my shoulder at Raze. “Whereas you only managed to give me a headache more than a dozen times. Why didn’t you ever learn a new trick?”
“Because the old one was funny. Why mess with perfection?”
There was no arguing with that, and frankly, I was too worn-out to try. So instead, I poked through the box of food. In addition to a croissant, there was a little tube of juice, a pat of butter shaped like a rose, half an orange, and some spreadable cheese. It would last me maybe an hour if I was lucky, but it was all I had, so I finished it all. Finally, I turned my attention to the computer.
It occurred to me that I did not have a degree in accounting, tax law, or anything numeric in nature. Also, I wasn’t evil, so I really didn’t know how to be an IRS agent. “Uh, what am I supposed to be doing?”
“Pretty much whatever you want. Ruin as many lives as you like. But I should warn you, they keep an eye on that.” Raze’s voice made it clear that she thought it was totally lame that she couldn’t just destroy thousands of people’s livelihoods. “You should probably do actual work to keep it balanced. I don’t know. I mostly just play Solitaire.”
“Prison,” I said, staring bleakly at the screen. “It’s office work.”
“Yeah, right. Like real office computers have actual Solitaire on them these days.”
I poked around through the computer, trying to figure out what I could and couldn’t do. All types of communication seemed to be forbidden. I couldn’t reach any of the messenger boards, and even the Domino was blocked. So I’d been handed a computer, but it was useless.
“What’s she like?” Raze asked, breaking the silence.
“Who?” I asked.
“Your other nemesis.” Raze’s voice held all of the hurt of a kid accidentally forgotten after school. “She has a stupid name.”
“She killed my friend and she did her best to kill me. Trust me, I’d rather you were my archnemesis,” I said, paging through the files available to me.
“You really mean that?”
Though I was about to open my mouth to say that of course I did because Razor X hadn’t actually managed to do any lasting harm, it occurred to me that maybe pissing off my cubicle mate was probably not the wisest policy. “Yeah,” I said instead. “I mean that.”
“That’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me.” She spun back around to play Solitaire again.
“Great,” I said under my breath. “That’s not gonna come back to bite me in the ass at all.”
“Miss Godwin?” One of the guards appeared. It wasn’t Perky Tabitha, but it could have been a close relation. She had the same one-sudden-move-away-from-running-for-my-life smile. “Your boyfriend’s here to see you.”
My heart leapt
. I was on my feet so fast that Raze shook her head at me, but I didn’t care. Guy had finally made it out to the prison. Finally, I would start to get some answers. I followed my new guard out of the office, through all of the places I’d already visited, and finally into a little hallway near Processing. She dropped me off with two guards who were wearing the same blue-gray uniforms I recognized from the transport van.
“Check her implant,” one said, and the other pushed down hard on the side of my neck, where I had a little bump in my shoulder. I swiped at his hand, but he’d already pulled it back. “Still active?”
“Affirmative.”
“Thanks.” The first guard held up a set of handcuffs, which automatically made my stomach jump. But if it meant seeing Guy . . . I held up my wrists. “You will be granted fifteen minutes to meet with your visitor. Any talk about what happens inside these walls will be grounds for immediate removal of both you and the visitor from the area and subsequent removal of all visiting privileges. Is this understood?”
“I can’t . . . talk about anything at Detmer?” I asked, squinting at him.
Instead of giving me a simple yes or no answer, he repeated the entire spiel.
“Fine, fine,” I said, hoping to stop a third repeat of the speech. “Understood. I won’t talk about Detmer.”
“You will be under constant watch the entire time,” my guard said, taking me by the elbow and leading me through a vault door into the visitor’s area.
The bamboo floors and pristine walls were immediately replaced by scuffed linoleum and plaster. Several low tables were spaced throughout the room. A guard was posted at every window, with several weapons on display. I swallowed hard. The windows and doors probably all contained the taser that would incapacitate me easily if Rita was to be believed. I could see blue sky beyond, beating down hard over what looked like a barren, empty field. August in northern Illinois had struck hard, it appeared.
I forgot all about that when my eyes fell on the tall man with green eyes sitting at one of the tables.
“Hey, babe,” Jeremy Collins said. “Miss me?”
CHAPTER FOUR
I stared at him, mouth bobbing silently. There had been a time where I could call Jeremy Collins my boyfriend, but those days were long past. He’d dumped me in a hospital room after an attack from the very same villain I’d just left in my cubicle. That sort of thing tended to fester though I’d forgiven him after finding out that he was being held underground in a superhero complex for his own protection. It was a little hard to hate the guy whose life had been screwed up due to his association with you.
I stepped forward because he might be my ex, but he was still the most familiar thing I’d seen since coming to Detmer. Abruptly, a lump formed in my throat. I shut my eyes.
“Oh god,” he said, and I heard him scrambling to his feet. “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. If Gu—if he finds out that I made you cry, he’ll probably drop the nice-guy act and kick my ass. Don’t do that.”
“What the hell is going on?” I asked, opening my eyes. The tears were still a threat, but it was mitigated for now. “Why are you here?” And where was Guy, my actual boyfriend?
“Here, give me a hug,” he said, stepping forward. I stepped into his arms, which proved awkward because my hands were still cuffed. “Sorry,” he whispered. “He was going to come—in uniform. But he and Vicki got word that Chelsea had been spotted, so we thought I could sneak in. We needed to see you.”
“Thanks. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Consider me an official liaison, willing to pass on any messages. But don’t ask me to kiss him for you. You know how I feel about redheads.”
I couldn’t help it. The joke was stupid, but it made me laugh, or at least let out a hiccupy sob. It made sense for Jeremy to show up in Guy’s place. We were in public, and my physical appearance might have changed, but I was still recognizable as Hostage Girl. And if Hostage Girl were ever seen in public with a well-built, tall man, suspicions about his identity would automatically be raised. People needed to keep thinking Blaze was Jeremy Collins, which meant that Guy Bookman and Gail Godwin were only ex-coworkers and nothing more.
“You love redheads,” I said, stepping back and swiping covertly at my eyes.
He wrinkled his nose at me. “Sure, the redheaded women. But—uh, I would never be unfaithful to you, babe. You have my undying love and devotion for all time.”
“You are really terrible at faking this,” I said, and I finally really looked at him. I’d always teased him for how much time he put into his appearance, but his clothing was disheveled, his hair a mess, and there were bruise-like circles under his eyes. A thick bandage was wrapped around his right hand, which made me wince. No video games for a while for him. He also smelled like he hadn’t showered in a couple of days. Not quite rank yet, but sometimes having enhanced senses wasn’t the nicest.
From the way he was eyeing me, though, I guess I looked about the same.
“What the hell have they done to you?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
“For the most part. These injuries are all from the fight in the mall.” I looked at the guards posted all around the room and took a seat at the table, trying not to let it bother me that they weren’t even hiding their open interest in Jeremy and me. “I have a question.”
“What is it? I’ll answer anything I can.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know. None of us know.”
I leaned forward onto my elbows. “They think I’m helping Chelsea. The woman’s tried to kill me every time she sees me, and they think I’m working with her. They didn’t even need to present any evidence. Just wham, bam, guilty, and now I’m in prison, dealing with—”
One of the guards coughed, loudly.
“—everything,” I said, glaring at the guard. Right. Not allowed to talk about Detmer. Have to hide the fact that we took society’s most dangerous criminals, coddled them, and gave them unlimited rein to run our country’s taxes. “Why on earth do they think any of this? It’s ridiculous! And Angélica—” My voice broke a little. Since another sob seemed imminent, I bit down hard on my lower lip. “Angélica, she—”
Jeremy cautiously reached out and covered my cuffed hands with his own. The bandage felt scratchy against my skin. “It’s rough,” he said. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m, you know, dealing and—you don’t think I had anything to do with that, do you? And G—he doesn’t, right?” It was suddenly, wholly vital that they know I would never hurt Angélica.
“No way. You love—you loved Angélica. We all did.”
“Even you?”
“I mean, I didn’t know her as well as you.” Jeremy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “The few times I talked to her, though, I liked her. She was scary, but she had your back at the end of the day, and you could tell, you know?”
I could only nod. He’d described Angélica to a tee.
“And nobody in our group thinks you would ever work with Chelsea. We know you better than that, Girl. Gail.” Jeremy squeezed my hands once and drew his own back. When he picked up his water, I could see little tremors shaking across its surface. “But they have evidence.”
“That’s not possible,” I said, sitting up straight.
“They have—”
“Jeremy,” I said, “that’s not possible. That can’t be possible because I have never and I will never work with Chelsea. Ergo, there is no possible evidence that they could pull out—”
“They have text messages,” Jeremy said in a rush. When I stared at him, not comprehending, he set the water cup down and picked it up. “They say they’re between you and Chelsea. From—from the time you were missing. They were from your old phone, and they sound just like you.”
“I lost that phone,” I said slowly. “When Mobius kidnapped me in the coffee shop.
It vanished, and I was—I was unconscious. There is no possible way I could have—”
“None of us think you did it,” Jeremy said. “We know you, Gail, and we’re doing everything we can to clear your name. But . . .” He scrunched his eyes shut, taking a deep breath like he was bracing himself. “But you were kind of missing for nearly three weeks, and nobody saw you or had any idea of your whereabouts. They haven’t found this doctor you claim gave you your powers—”
“I don’t know where he is!” My memories from the place where Dr. Mobius had kept me were annoyingly vague. I remembered escaping with him from something, and of being hit by a van and waking up in an ambulance, but I hadn’t known where he had been holding me or anything else about the escape. My body had been acclimating to the Mobium, and now I suspected he might have sedated me, but I had no way of being sure. What I did know was that there was no way I could have sent text messages in that state.
“And . . .” Jeremy cringed again. “You did kind of drop back on the grid the same day Chelsea first attacked.”
“That was a coincidence. You have to believe me, that was a total coincidence. I’m—I’m being framed.” I had to take a deep breath. When that did nothing, I took another and another until I was nearly hyperventilating. It had been at the back of my mind the whole time. Somebody was framing me, somebody was setting me up. But now there was evidence, and I couldn’t think or focus.
Why was this happening to me?
“Yeah, we’re pretty sure you’re being torpedoed,” Jeremy said.
I threw myself against the back of the seat, a bad move since it made discomfort sing up and down the length of my spine. It helped with the shock, a little. “So their reasoning is, what? That Chelsea and I were secretly in cahoots? That we planned that attack at the bank together so I could infiltrate the Davenport complex as a spy?”
“Basically. And according to the briefing, you were alone with Chelsea after Gu—Bla—after I flew off with that reporter chick, so theoretically you could have worked together and planned to take Angélica down. Because maybe she was onto something about you.”
